1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to electronic devices in general, and, in particular, to a method for preventing over-heating of an electronic device within an information processing system.
2. Description of Related Art
With the continued improvement and development of faster components used in information processing systems, the complexity of heat management for the components also increase. Incidentally, the effective heat management for information processing systems becomes a big challenge.
In general, the power status of an information processing system can typically be defined at least as follows:                S0: operational status, the actual status is in normal operation;        S1: first standby status, which will cut off the power for some peripheral devices, generally stopping power supply to hard disk and monitor, and so on, but still supplying power to central processing unit (CPU), fan memory, fan, and so on;        S2: second standby status, which will cut off the power for some peripheral devices, generally stopping power supply to hard disk, monitor, central processing unit, cache memory, and so on;        S3: suspend status, which will cut off the power for some peripheral devices, generally stopping power supply to hard disk, monitor, central processing unit, cache memory, and so on, but only supplying power to random access memory (RAM) for storing the operation status in the RAM;        S4: hibernate status, which will turn off the main portion of system power and store the operation status in the hard disk;        S5: soft off status, which will turn off all the power except the power management unit of the core chip; and        G3: mech off status, which also turn off the power management unit of the core chip.        
Thus, when the status of power supply is suspend status S3, soft off status S5, or hibernate status S4, the main power of the power supply device is turned off, but the standby power is still supplied to the target devices. As a result, the temperatures of various devices within an information processing system will continue to increase. Consequently, it would be desirable to prevent those devices from being damaged by over-heating.